SoundHound, Inc. and its affiliates ( “SoundHound,” “we,” “us,” or “our” ), are committed to protecting your privacy. It is our mission to empower products across the globe with technologies that provide better user experiences, such as through our platforms that provide advanced voice and conversational intelligence. We want you to have confidence in our products and services and to know that any information we process from or about you or your devices is adequately protected.
This Policy describes how we collect, use, disclose, and otherwise process information from or about you or your devices when you use:
- Our downloadable software and mobile applications (including applications for tablets and other connected devices) provided by us, including the SoundHound and Hound mobile applications ( “Apps” ),
- Our websites, www.soundhound.com, www.houndify.com, and www.midomi.com ( “Sites” ) and,
- A third party application or other product that incorporates our technology through our Houndify program ( “Houndify-Enabled Products” ), (collectively, the “ Services ”).
This Privacy Policy does not apply to any of the practices of a Houndify-Enabled Product other than our practices expressly disclosed below. For most Houndify-Enabled Products, SoundHound is the service provider or processor of your information. As the processor, SoundHound processes your information according to the instructions of the third-party provider of the Houndify-Enabled Product. To understand how the third-party provider of your Houndify-Enabled Product manages your information, please refer to the third-party provider’s privacy policy.
This Privacy Policy is incorporated into our Terms of Service for SoundHound and Hound . By onboarding the Services, you agree to the terms of this Policy.
Information We Collect
We may collect information from or about you or your devices from various sources described below.
If you do not provide your information when requested, you may not be able to use our Services if that information is necessary to provide you with our Services or if we are legally required to collect it. Where applicable, we indicate whether and why you must provide us with your information, as well as the consequences of failing to do so.
Information Provided by You
- Registration Information. When you register to use the Services, sign up for notifications or updates on the Services, or participate in our surveys, we may collect your name, email address, zip code, and any other information that you provide to us.
- Social Network Information. If you choose to connect the Services to your social network accounts (or other third party services or applications, such as music or transportation providers), we may collect your profile information (such as your name, locale, email address, and profile picture) and other information available on your social network account.
- Voice and Audio Information. When you ask to perform a search with your voice or an audio recording, or when you use your voice to control the Services (e.g., by singing or humming into the Services), we may collect voice or audio interactions. We may also share your voice or audio interactions with SoundHound contractors for quality control purposes. These contractors are under a duty of confidentiality.
- Information Maintained on Your Device. When you use the Services, and when you have enabled such collection in your device or App settings, we may collect certain information maintained on your device to help us tailor our Services to you, such as the contact information in your device’s address book, or your calendars stored on your device.
- Midomi Member Profile and Other Information. Prior to May 2020, we may have collected additional information from midomi users, such as payment information to facilitate media purchases. In addition, we may have collected certain information you provided about yourself for your public profile (such as hobbies, interests, zip code, state, country, musical interests, tastes, influences, evaluations of other users’ recordings, photographs, and song files). Please note that any member profile information, media, music, audio recording, image, comment, or any other content you posted onto midomi prior to May 2020 was publicly available and may have been collected and used by others. SoundHound has deleted this data from its databases, except for certain audio recordings. Associated email addresses are retained for the purpose of fulfilling privacy requests.
Information Obtained from Your Interactions with our Services
- Usage Information. When you use our Services, our servers may automatically collect information about how you use the Services, such as what you search for and what you look at.
- Device Information. When you use our Services, our servers may automatically collect information about the device and software you use to access our Services, such as the operating system, hardware model, application or browser version, and unique identifiers associated with your device, such as your device’s advertising identifiers.
- Location Information. When you use the Services, and when you have enabled such collection in your device or App settings, we may collect location information that your mobile device or browser provides. Depending on how you access the Services, we may receive precise geolocation information from GPS, WiFi, or cell tower location, or rough location information.
- Log Information. When you use our Services, our servers may automatically collect system logs or similar information about your interaction with the Services from your browser. This may include information such as IP address, browser language, date and time of access, browser type or the domain from which you are visiting, web-pages you visit, search terms you use, features you click on and cookie information.
- Cookies and Similar Technologies. When you use our Services, our servers may automatically collect additional website usage data to improve our Services.
- A cookie is a small data file that we transfer to your Internet enabled device for security purposes and to improve our Services by providing technical details about your session. A session cookie enables certain features of our Services and is deleted from your computer when you disconnect from or leave the Services. A persistent cookie remains after you disconnect from or leave the Services and may be used on subsequent visits.
- This automatically collected information may include your IP address or other device address or ID, web browser and/or device type, the web pages or sites that you visit just before or just after you use the Services , the pages or other content you view or otherwise interact with on the Services, and the dates and times that you visit, access, or use the Services.
- We use this information to provide you with our Services and tailor them to you by gathering and remembering information about your preferences. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser settings to decline cookies. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of our Services. You can also learn more by visiting our Cookie Policy .
- Third-party Analytics Tools. We use analytics providers such as Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting, Crashlytics, and others that use cookies and similar technologies to collect and analyze information about use of the Services and report on activities and trends. These services may also collect information regarding the use of other websites, apps and online resources. You can learn about Google’s practices by going to https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/ , and opt out of them by downloading the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, available at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. You can also learn more by visiting our Cookie Policy.
How We Use Your Information
We use information from or about you or your devices for the following purposes:
- To provide and improve our Services and to improve the relevance of information provided to you by our Services, such as by personalizing your user experience;
- To communicate with you and to respond to your inquiries;
- To update your status on your social networks, to send messages on your behalf to your social networks, and to provide other features and services to you;
- To refine and improve our audio recognition capabilities, and to respond to requests, searches, or commands you speak into the Services;
- To facilitate the connection of third party services or applications, such as social networks, music streaming services, and transportation providers;
- To send you marketing communications and other types of offers or advertisements, which may be tailored to you, based on information such as your interests and preferences, and to improve the relevance of advertisements displayed to you. For example, we may send you an email to alert you about product upgrades, special offers, updated information and other new products and services.
- To enforce legal rights and to comply with the law;
- To comply with an order from a government entity or other competent authority;
- To prevent or address potential or actual injury or interference with our rights, property, operations, customers or others who may be harmed or may suffer loss or damage;
- To protect our rights, prevent fraud and/or comply with judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on SoundHound;
- For other purposes for which we provide specific notice at the time of the collection of the information.
How We Share Your Information
We do not share or otherwise disclose information we collect from or about you, except as described below or otherwise disclosed to you at the time of the collection.
We may share the information we collect from or about you with:
- Our affiliates;
- Our service providers performing services on our behalf (e.g., Site hosting providers and other parties who assist us in operating our Site, conducting our business, or serving our customers). In addition, we may also share your voice or audio interactions with SoundHound contractors for quality control purposes. These contractors are under a duty of confidentiality;
- Business partners, such as developers who provide Houndify-Enabled Products. If you are using a Houndify-Enabled Product, we may share certain usage and limited voice and audio information with the developer of that application to help them provide or improve their product;
- Third parties, such as law enforcement entities or parties involved in a corporate transaction if (i) we are required to do so by law or in response to legal process, (ii) to enforce our site policies, or (iii) protect ours or others’ rights, property, or safety or (iv) in the event we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing due diligence, reorganization, bankruptcy or liquidation where the business will not continue as a going concern, receivership, sale of assets, or transition of our Services to another provider, then any information we collect may be sold or transferred as part of such a transaction as permitted by law and/or contract;
- Third parties, such as our vendors, suppliers, advertisers, and analytics companies to improve our Services and the relevance of the content provided by those third parties. This information is shared in aggregate form, except for certain interactions you make with advertising content (for example, when you click on an ad to upgrade an App).
- We do not share information about our own cookies with third parties. If you opt-in to our analytics and advertising cookies, third parties can access cookie information only from their own cookies. We utilize third-party analytics, including Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting, to understand our users better so that we can improve our Services to you. We may also share anonymous demographic and age data with our advertising partners;
- Third parties, with whom you can share data through the functionality provided by the Services for sharing or exporting your search results.
Please note that if you use YouTube’s playback feature in our Apps, your use of YouTube is subject to YouTube’s Terms of Service and Google’s Privacy Policy. Please refer to Google’s Privacy Policy for more information about how YouTube uses your information.
Please note that for our midomi website at www.midomi.com , any member profile information, media, music, audio recording, image, comment, or any other content posted onto midomi prior to May 2020 was publicly available and may have been collected and used by others. SoundHound has deleted this data from its databases, except for certain audio recordings. Associated email addresses are retained for the purpose of fulfilling privacy requests.
Individuals Located in the EU
- Residents in the European Union are entitled to certain rights with respect to personal information that we hold about them under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- We may also rely on various legal grounds to collect, use, and otherwise process your information, including when:
- We need your information to provide you with services and products requested by you, or to respond to your inquiries;
- We have a legal obligation to process your information;
- We or a third party have a legitimate interest in using your information. In particular, we have a legitimate interest in using your information to ensure and improve the security and performance of our Service, to anonymize your information, to carry out data analyses, and to protect us or our business partners against fraud. We may also collect your Personal Information to record your requests to exercise your rights and to verify your identity for such requests.
- In some limited cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect information from you, in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet law enforcement requirements.
- Consent you provide where we do not rely on another legal basis. Consent may be withdrawn at any time.
Your Rights and Choices
You may limit some of the information we collect as follows:
- Location Information. You may stop our collection of location information in our Apps by managing your App settings or turning off location services for your device, if your device allows you to do so. Please refer to your device’s settings or user manual for instructions on how to turn off location services.
- Contacts. You may enable or disable the sharing of contacts information to improve voice recognition in Hound via the “Contacts” switch in the settings page.
- Personalized Advertising. You may opt-out of the processing by advertising service providers who may collect certain information from you when you use our Services and may use that or other information to serve you with advertisements that may be of greater interest to you. Some of these service providers are members of the Network Advertising Initiative or the Digital Advertising Alliance . If you do not wish to receive personalized ads in our Services, please visit the opt-out pages for those organizations to learn about how you may opt out of receiving personalized ads from member companies.
- Advertising Identifiers. You may opt out of our use of your mobile device’s advertising identifier to serve personalized advertising in our Apps by enabling the global interest-based advertising opt-out option appropriate to your device. Please note that opting out via this setting will not affect our use or sharing of any information we have already collected. For more information regarding these advertising identifiers and their options, please visit https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/3405269 for Android devices or https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074 for iOS devices.
- Marketing Communications. Any marketing emails we send you will contain instructions for how to unsubscribe from receiving future marketing communications. Please note, however, that you may still receive administrative announcements, such as service disruptions, via email even if you unsubscribe from marketing communications.
- Do Not Track. Some browsers provide you with a way to signal that you do not want your browsing activity to be tracked. The Services may not currently respond to a Do Not Track (“DNT”) or similar signal, as we are awaiting consensus from the Internet policy and legal community on the meaning of DNT and the best way to respond to these signals.
If you choose not to provide us with information we collect, some features of the Services may not work as intended without access to these sorts of information. For example, navigation features in our Apps need access to your location to work properly and responses to voice queries that involve contacts’ information will not work as well without knowing the spelling of your contacts.
In some countries, and in particular if you are located in the EU, you may have the right to:
Request access to and receive information about the information we maintain about you, to update and correct inaccuracies in your information, to restrict or to object to the processing of your information, to have the information anonymized or deleted, as appropriate, or to exercise your right to data portability to easily transfer your information to another company.
Withdraw any consent you previously provided to us regarding the processing of your information, at any time and free of charge. We will apply your preferences going forward and this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before your consent withdrawal.
In addition, you may also have the right to lodge a GDPR complaint with a supervisory authority, including in your country of residence, place of work or where an incident took place. A list of Supervisory Authorities is available here: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/bodies/authorities/index_en.htm .
Those rights may be limited in some circumstances by local law requirements. You may exercise your rights by contacting us as specified below. We will respond to any complaints as soon as possible and within thirty (30) days, but we may first need to request additional information from you to confirm your identity.
If you reside in an applicable jurisdiction and would like to exercise your rights in relation to information from or about you, you may contact us at [email protected] or write to us at Attn: Privacy Group, 5400 Betsy Ross Drive, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, U.S.A.
In your request, please make clear which information your request relates to and provide your name, address, email address, and telephone number so that we can attempt to find your information and contact you regarding your request. We may also need to verify your identity before implementing your request.
Please note that we may need to retain certain information for recordkeeping or legal compliance purposes and/or to complete any transactions that you began prior to requesting such change or deletion.
We may transfer information from or about you or your devices to countries other than the country where you are located (including the United States), which may not have the same data protection laws as your jurisdiction. For more information regarding our compliance with the Privacy Shield Frameworks to authorize these data transfers, please review the section Privacy Shield Frameworks below . In addition, we enter into Standard Contractual Clauses issued by the European Commission with our business partners where appropriate.
California Privacy Rights
If you are a California consumer, you have the following rights:
● The right to know what personal information is being collected about you.
● The right to know whether your personal information is sold or disclosed and to whom.
● The right to say no to the sale of personal information.
● The right to access your personal information.
● The right, in certain circumstances, to delete the information you have provided to us.
● The right to equal service and price, even if you exercise your privacy rights.
Request for Information and Deletion. California consumers have the right to request, up to twice in a 12-month period, that a business that collects personal information about the consumer disclose to the consumer the information listed below for the preceding 12 months. We have the right to request verification of your identity for all requests for information.
(1) The categories of personal information it has collected about that consumer.
(2) The categories of sources from which the personal information is collected.
(3) The business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling personal information.
(4) The categories of third parties with whom the business shares personal information.
(5) The categories of personal information that the business sold about the consumer and the categories of third parties to whom the personal information was sold, by category or categories of personal information for each third party to whom the personal information was sold.
(6) The categories of personal information that the business disclosed about the consumer for a business purpose.
(7) The specific pieces of personal information it has collected about that consumer.
SoundHound does not require a user to enter a phone number, mobile ID, or email address to use our Apps. This helps to protect your privacy. If you do not register for an account with our Apps and choose to delete our Apps from your device, SoundHound may be unable to locate or delete any data associated with the deleted application.
To make such a request, please contact us at [email protected] or mail us at the address below.
Do Not Sell My Personal Information. SoundHound Inc. does not sell your data. We do present interest-based ads on some of our platforms and strive to ensure these ads are relevant. Our Cookie Policy provides information on how you can control your advertising preferences.
Third Party Marketing. California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits you to request information regarding the disclosure of your personal information to third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. SoundHound does not share your personal information with third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes.
Privacy Shield Frameworks
Please note that the Court of Justice of the European Union issued a judgment declaring as “invalid” the European Commission’s Decision (EU) 2016/1250 of 12 July 2016 on the adequacy of the protection provided by the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. As a result of that decision, the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework is no longer a valid mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States. For more information, please refer to the FTC’s FAQs here: https://www.privacyshield.gov/article?id=EU-U-S-Privacy-Shield-Program-Update
SoundHound will continue to abide by its Privacy Shield commitments, as further outlined below. In addition, where required by applicable EU law, SoundHound will rely on alternative mechanisms for transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States. This includes your explicit consent, performance of our contract obligations, and standard contractual clauses.
SoundHound complies with the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework as set forth by the US Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal information from European Union member countries, United Kingdom and Switzerland transferred to the United States pursuant to Privacy Shield. SoundHound has certified that it adheres to the Privacy Shield Principles with respect to such data. If there is any conflict between the policies in this privacy policy and data subject rights under the Privacy Shield Principles, the Privacy Shield Principles shall govern. To learn more about the Privacy Shield program, and to view our certification page, please visit https://www.privacyshield.gov and https://www.soundhound.com/privacy-shield .
With respect to personal data received or transferred pursuant to the Privacy Shield Frameworks, SoundHound is subject to the regulatory enforcement powers of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Pursuant to the Privacy Shield Frameworks, EU, United Kingdom and Swiss individuals have the right to obtain our confirmation of whether we maintain personal information relating to you in the United States. Upon request, we will provide you with access to the personal information that we hold about you. You may also correct, amend, or delete the personal information we hold about you. An individual who seeks access, or who seeks to correct, amend, or delete inaccurate data transferred to the United States under Privacy Shield, should direct their query to [email protected] . If requested to remove data, we will respond within a reasonable timeframe.
We will provide an individual opt-out or opt-in choice before we share your data with third parties other than our agents, or before we use it for a purpose other than which it was originally collected or subsequently authorized. To request to limit the use and disclosure of your personal information, please submit a written request to [email protected].
As explained in this Privacy Policy, we sometimes provide your information to third parties to perform services on our behalf. If we transfer personal information received under the Privacy Shield to a third party, the third party’s access, use, and disclosure of the personal data must also be in compliance with our Privacy Shield obligations, and we will remain liable under the Privacy Shield for any failure to do so by the third party unless we prove we are not responsible for the event giving rise to the damage. We may be required to disclose personal information that we handle under the Privacy Shield in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.
In compliance with the Privacy Shield Principles, SoundHound commits to resolve complaints about your privacy and our collection or use of your personal information transferred to the United States pursuant to Privacy Shield. European Union and Swiss individuals with Privacy Shield inquiries or complaints should first contact SoundHound by email at [email protected] .
SoundHound has further committed to refer unresolved privacy complaints under the Privacy Shield Principles to an independent dispute resolution mechanism, JAMS Privacy Shield Dispute Resolution. Please visit https://www.jamsadr.com/eu-us-privacy-shield to file a claim. This service is provided free of charge to you.
If your Privacy Shield complaint cannot be resolved through the above channels, under certain conditions, you may invoke binding arbitration for some residual claims not resolved by other redress mechanisms. See Privacy Shield Annex 1 at https://www.privacyshield.gov/article?id=ANNEX-I-introduction
Security and Data Retention
SoundHound maintains an information security program designed to safeguard the systems that collect, process, and store the information we collect from or about you or your devices, including against threats of compromise, theft, or destruction. Unfortunately, no information storage system can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, and we cannot ensure or warrant against all forms of attack or compromise caused by unintentional errors, omissions, or malicious actors.
By using our Services, you expressly consent to the storage of the information we collect, including your registration information, location information, and recordings of your voice, in a form associated with your Application generated identifier. SoundHound does not require a user to enter a phone number, mobile ID, or email address to use our Apps.
We retain information from or about you or your devices for so long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy. When the information is no longer necessary for these purposes, we delete it or keep it in a form that does not identify you, unless we are required by law to keep this information for a longer period. When determining the retention period, we take into account various criteria, such as the type of products and services requested by or provided to you, the nature and length of our relationship with you, possible re-enrolment with our products or services, the impact on the services we provide to you if we delete some information from or about you, mandatory retention periods provided by law and the statute of limitations.
Children 13 and Under
Unfortunately, our Sites and Apps are not meant for children under age 13. By using the Sites or Apps, you represent that you are 13 years of age or older. If you are under 13, do not use the Sites or Apps or send any information about yourself to us.
We do not knowingly request or collect personal information from anyone under the age of 13 without requiring parental consent on our Sites or Apps where we act as the controller. If a parent or guardian becomes aware that his or her child has provided us with information without their consent, he or she should contact us at [email protected] . We will delete such information within a reasonable period of time.
In certain circumstances, for our Houndify-Enabled Products, we may act as the processor to third-party providers, and collect personal information from individuals under the age of 13 on their behalf. We use this information to provide our services to the third-party provider and do not share this information to the public or disclose it. To understand how the third-party provider of your Houndify-Enabled Product collects, uses or shares children’s information or to exercise your rights with respect to the third-party provider, please refer to the third-party provider’s privacy policy.
Third Party Apps and Links to Third Party Websites
This Privacy Policy does not apply to links you follow from the Services (including the practices of a Houndify-Enabled Product other than those expressly disclosed above) to other sites, services, applications, or online stores. For example, if you use sharing features to send a tweet or to post on a social network, the information you send will be visible to others.
To understand how other sites, services, applications, and online stores handle your information, please refer to their respective privacy policies.
Changes to this Policy
We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time, without prior notice. When we do, we will post the changed policy on our Sites and in the Apps, and we will revise the Effective Date listed below. At our discretion, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you of material changes, by email to any address you may have provided to us, through a pop-up window on the Sites or in the Apps, or other similar mechanism as appropriate under the circumstances. By continuing to use the Sites or Apps after we post the revised Privacy Policy to them, you signify your acceptance of the revised policy. We encourage you to periodically review this Privacy Policy so you know how we are collecting, using, and sharing your information.
Contact Information
SoundHound, Inc. is responsible for processing your information. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about our processing activities, please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Attn: Privacy Group, 5400 Betsy Ross Drive, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, U.S.A.